Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
The following material was published in 1984 in Christianity and Civilization No. 4: The Reconstruction of the Church, pages 6-9, and are reprinted here as grist for the mill of the discussion of “evangelicalism.” Footnotes have not come through, of course. Though this material is offered in connection with a…
I wrote my beef about “regeneration” a decade ago, and I don’t really see the need to reopen what I think now. (Jordan, Thoughts on Sovereign Grace and Regeneration: Some Tentative Explorations. Biblical Horizons Occasional Paper No. 32) But. My pal Doug Wilson has been writing a series of essays…
Nicodemus’s conversation with Jesus in John 3:1-15 is sometimes regarded as an illustration of the tremendous stupidity of the Jews of our Lord’s day. Nicodemus is treated as just some guy who comes to Jesus at night because he doesn’t want to get into trouble by being seen with Him.…
During the last couple of weeks, Douglas Wilson has issued several posts over on his Blog and Mablog blog that deal with “evangelicalism” and who is and who is not an “evangelical.” In the course of these postings, Doug has written that while I am a fine Christian who has…
Here are three issues in regard to the Eastern Church. First, here is the quote from Bavinck’s The Doctrine of God, page 317, Banner of Truth edition (1977) under the heading of Inter-Personal Relations. The Greeks derived the unity of God’s essence and the unity of the persons not from…
Elsewhere on the blogosphere men are mocking the wearing of collars and albs to lead in worship. When it is pointed out that historically Reformed ministers have worn daily uniforms and robes in worship, it is replied that that was then and this is now. We ought to conform to…
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Bodies are objects, but beginning with Husserl philosophers, anthropologists and others have considered not the objective character of the body but the “live body” that is both a living object and a cultural artifact. In the sense that the lived body is a cultural artifact, writes John Dunnill in his…
In Sacrifice and the Body , John Dunnill makes the simple observation that most of what ancient Israelites sacrificed was food. This means that “the elements of thanksgiving and tribute, which are always implicitly present in such meal offerings, not only attribute the harvest to God, and return a small…
John Dunnill’s summary of the interconnections of gift, creation, covenant, sacrifice, and Trinity is lovely ( Sacrifice and the Body , 29): “To say that the world is gift, and that human life fulfills itself when it responds by giving, is more than a perception or ungrounded assertion about the…
Summarizing the prophetic critique of sacrifice, John Dunnill ( Sacrifice and the Body , 38) rebuts Roland de Vaux’s claim that “God demands first and foremost an interior religion” and that the prophets aimed their attacks as “outward religion” as such. Dunnill argues, on the contrary, that “the critique expresses…
In their 1994 The Archetypal Actions of Ritual , Caroline Humphrey and James Laidlaw attempt a philosophically sophisticated definition of ritual. Through a survey of the existing literature on ritual, the authors seek to determine what kind of theory or ritual is needed. They reject theories that claim that ritual…
In his study of circumcision, Marked in Your Flesh , Leonard Glick picks up a suggestion made by Jon Levenson that circumcision in ancient Israel might symbolize child sacrifice. The cutting of the foreskin would function as a substitute for the cutting of the child, a reenactment of the aqedah…
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